Marty Kaplan

Marty Kaplan is a Senior Columnist at The Forward, and he holds the Norman Lear chair at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, where he founded and directs the Norman Lear Center for the study of entertainment, media and society. As a columnist for the Jewish Journal of Los Angeles, he won first place at the L.A. Press Club’s journalism awards six times in the past six years.

A native of Newark, New Jersey, he graduated summa cum laude in molecular biology from Harvard, where was president of the Harvard Lampoon and gave the English Oration at commencement. The winner of a Marshall scholarship, he got a First in English from Cambridge University. He holds the first Ph.D. conferred by Stanford University in modern thought and literature.

In the Carter Administration, Kaplan served as chief speechwriter to Vice President Walter F. Mondale. As deputy campaign manager of Mondale’s presidential race, he ran speechwriting, issues and research.

He worked at Walt Disney Studios for 12 years, as a vice president of production for live-action feature films, and then as a screenwriter. His film credits include “The Distinguished Gentleman,” a political comedy starring Eddie Murphy that he wrote and executive produced, and “Noises Off,” directed by Peter Bogdanovich.

He has been a frequent guest on television, radio, in print and online, including several appearances on Bill Moyers’s shows; as a featured blogger at HuffPo since its inception; and as a recurring commentator on the public radio programs All Things Considered and Marketplace. He also created and hosted “So What Else Is News?,” a nationally syndicated Air America Radio program examining media, politics and pop culture. He lives in Los Angeles.

Oprah gave a pitch-perfect commencement speech at my school’s graduation, a mix of motivation (“Be the truth. Be. The. Truth.”) and motivation shtick (“Invest in a quality mattress. And don’t cheap out on your shoes.”). The exhortation that won the biggest rise from the thousand USC Annenberg students: “Vote. Vote. Vote.” Their cheers almost made me forget that most of them probably won’t.

In this week’s episode, Roseanne hates on the Muslims. Spoiler alert: By the end, Roseanne gets woke. But how many racist jokes can the season’s highest-rated scripted TV series make without itself being racist?